journalist, author, and editor based in New York City, who grew up in Sweden and New York.

Tag: Barry Farber

Peter Barry Chowka found (in the archives) and tweeted, an article I wrote about the future of radio, for Media Post, in 2008. I don’t often post published articles of mine here, but some of them hold up well. I don’t even own a copy of my own book. I’ve never read my Wikipedia page. I react neither to praise, nor attacks. I just think about one thing: How to return from disembodiment. Once I have cracked it, I will have a real book too write.

I used to love the process of writing, how it felt to get an idea, when the material started to buzz and hum. Seeing it on the page. Now I mostly write inside my mind, just listening to all the voices, lines, twigs of words. I don’t aim to organize it anymore. I seem to be waiting, like a fossil under the ice bed, until some giant biblical thaw makes it once again a free and safer world, for expression. When the storms of hatred subside, the hammer-blows over the heads of the different-minded.

“Radio used to be strange, free, intimate, mossy – like an enchanted forest, dominated by a few heavy trees that seemed to have sprung from a soil of eccentricity and showmanship. Anything could happen there. It was a medium for the ever wandering minds, the insomniacs, the history buffs, the truth-seekers. Talking meant talking – which entailed listening, combing the ocean’s floor for that which might surprise or delight. It was not, or did not seem, all that connected to money, power or politics – until the mid 1990s. It was around that time I started to truly lose sight of the medium that honors my father as one of its shapers.

When talk is free, when nobody has harnessed it, it is closer to music than speech. Not what is said, but the way it is said.”